Several years ago, I discussed my dissatisfaction with honor as a concept — not that being honorable is bad, but that honor is too wrapped up with pride and reputation. Reading AMERICAN HONOR: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals During the Revolutionary Era by Craig Bruce Smith makes me appreciate there are more ways to interpret “honor” than I was thinking of.
Smith looks at how America in the colonial and revolutionary era debated the nature of honor. Did it come from titles and pedigree, as it did in Europe? Wealth and outward display of status? Was virtuous or ethical conduct part of being honorable or were they separate things? There was also a sense of the American colonies having a collective honor, something under attack by the British crown’s increasingly high-handed rule; conversely, even women and free African-Americans could earn honor by working for the cause of independence.
This belief in honor by serving the nation didn’t erase the idea of personal honor and the two often conflicted, particularly in the military where rank and pay were both seen as a measure of honor. Benedict Arnold’s betrayal, for instance, was fueled in part by the belief he hadn’t received the honor and status he deserved. After the revolution, with no similar cause to fight in,the next generation became increasingly touchy about personal honor, which morphed into something closer to what my old post complained about. Worth reading if the topic interests you, as is Joanne Freeman’s Affairs of Honor, which I read several years ago.
A WOMAN SCORNED: Acquaintance Rape on Trial by Peggy Reeves Sanday shows that many of the misogynist excuses for not believing women are more recent and less universal in our culture than I realized. The Puritans, for example, believed that women had healthy sexual appetites so if a woman said No she probably meant it; by contrast, the 19th century believed women were passionless creatures and it was up to the man to override her refusal and turn No into Yes. Men were hunters, women were prey and that’s innate and unavoidable so rape was just the way it had to be. Of course, if some psycho leapt out at a woman and dragged her into the bushes, that was bad, but if it was someone she knew or dated, well obviously it wasn’t really rape. As Sanday shows, it usually was.
Sanday also shows how much of the problem was men performing masculinity for the approval of other men: the feelings of the woman you raped matter less than bragging to your buddies that you’d scored with yet another chick. The book traces how the idea of acquaintance and date rape took hold, becoming accepted into law by the mid-1990s, when she’s writing, and the inevitable backlash led by anti-feminist women such as Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe who found plenty of magazines and publishers happy to print their bullshit. Roiphe, for instance, insisted that fighting for a woman’s right to say no was no different than saying women weren’t sexual creatures (feminists are simultaneously sluts and prudes).
Sanday ends the book on an optimistic note that the backlash isn’t winning; I wonder if she’d be so optimistic with the Felon Rapist in the White House and the right wing trumpeting the right to rape from the rooftops?
All rights to image remain with current holders.
